At the end of the August 22nd episode of KCRW’s Left, Right and Center, former journalist and Canadian parliamentarian Chrystia Friedland pissed me off.

She was describing how America had hoped for a “peace dividend” following the fall of the USSR, and then after the drawdown in Iraq. However, she used this history to caution that America “can’t withdraw from the world” (min 15:30), and (therefore) must be prepared to go to war with countries like Russia, Syria and Iraq.

“Withdrawing from the world” is a familiar criticism of President Obama/Democrats when they don’t want to start another war. In June, Congressman Paul Ryan accused President Obama of “withdrawing from the world” by refusing to bomb ISIS or send troops back to Iraq. John McCain has said this too, in regards to Syria.

It seems every time the Washington war-hawk establishment gets spun up about another war--by our count, since President Obama’s reelection, it has happened with Egypt, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Ukraine, Iraq and Nigeria--they first trot out the lines about “Munich Moments”, then they try to portray advocates against another war as “isolationists”, and finish by admonishing that the U.S. cannot “withdraw from the world”.

We find these lines of attack, particularly when they come from hardcore conservatives or conservative think tanks, incredibly hypocritical. Take the Heritage Foundation. They host the text of a speech on their website from Walter Lohman, a director on their staff, called “Honoring America’s Superpower Responsibilities”, where Lohman repeatedly admonishes that America must not “withdraw from the world”. Lohman claims he is not just talking about military power, but other forms of engagement as well.

See conservatives love to “engage” the world, when it means fighting there. Anyone who backs down from a fight is “withdrawing” from America’s superpower responsibilities. Yet when it comes to low cost, simple ways to spread the rule of law--and international norms, which seemed so important to uphold in both Ukraine and Syria--Republicans and conservatives balk. As Kevin Drum pointed out, conservatives in particular hate treaties.

This applies to Senate Republicans particularly. In the last decade or so they have…

We’ve written about this before, defending ourselves--and fellow advocates for restraint in military adventures around the world--from charges of isolationism. But it seems important to bring it up again, especially when in Ukraine, the value of “international norms” was brought up again and again as the raison d’etre for intervention. In the words of Fareed Zakaria:

“But beyond these narrow considerations is a larger one: Do these countries want to live in a world entirely ruled by the interplay of national interests? Since 1945, there have been increasing efforts to put in place broader global norms — for example, against annexations by force. These have not always been honored, but, compared with the past, they have helped shape a more peaceful and prosperous world.”

We agree. International norms trump national self-interest, especially in the long run. But the true value of international norms isn’t created on the eve of war, it’s created in the years before conflict. The Senate, which has allowed its minority group to deny any new treaties since 1997, has done more to hurt international norms than not bombing Russia or the Islamic State.

The irony is that refusing to ratify global treaties makes the world more dangerous and free trade less likely.

Obviously, comparing every single foreign policy crisis to Munich in 1938 doesn’t make sense. And don’t kid yourself: every single foreign policy crisis in my adult lifetime--stretching from Iraq to Egypt to Iran (here, here and here) to Ukraine (here and here) and to Syria--has had some political leader invoking this terrible analogy.

In Syria’s case, the analogy--especially in hindsight--was particularly egregious. Unlike Hitler, Bashar al Assad hadn’t invaded a single one of his neighbors. Supporting the rebels would have probably (and ironically) strengthened ISIS. (As Fareed Zakaria pointed out--citing Marc Lynch--in civil wars, extremists tend to thrive, not moderates.) Since ISIS later expanded to Iraq, who they kind of invaded, in a way, fighting Bashar al Assad actually would have been like the U.S. siding with Germany in 1938.

So the question for today, and one we don’t have a great answer for, is how do we stop this analogy? Like HYDRA in a Captain America movie, every time we kill one head, two grow back. Here are some ideas:

2. One of those White House petitions saying President Obama should issue an executive order forbidding this analogy in his cabinet. That would be funny, but either unconstitutional or unproductive.

3. More data analysis on this term. I don’t need to repeat the arguments for why this comparison/analogy is beyond ludicrous. So instead we want to provide something new to the debate. What is the “Munich Moment’s” batting average? In other words, how often have critics who used this phrase been correct? (Probably once, with the original use of the term.)

4. Crush opponents with logic. Especially the growth of international institutions. The Munich conference existed in a world before the UN, NATO, the Arab League, the EU, the G-Anything and countless other international institutions. The world frankly uses diplomacy a lot more than it used to. What is particularly remarkable about all the accusations of “Munich Moments” is they don’t even occur during diplomatic meetings. These are countries with internal troubles, not great powers invading neighbors.

5. Call them real-life trolls? In the future, when anyone says, “Munich Moment” can we immediately say they just violated Godwin’s law, turn off their microphone (if they are on cable television), and move on?

6. Replace “Munich Moment” with “July Crisis” or “Gulf of Tonkin”. There are two other analogies out there. The first--”July Crisis”--is an analogy no one ever uses, but should. One hundred years ago last August, the leaders of Europe had a “July Crisis”, in which every diplomat utterly failed to prevent a senseless world war. The minor assassination of an archduke led to tens of millions of deaths. Instead of worrying about Munich Moments, we should be worried about a July Crisis. Gideon Rachman of FT made this argument pretty persuasively, when also pondering the centennial of World War I.

The second is more familiar in the U.S., but hasn’t been evoked since we invaded Iraq. In hindsight, the Johnson administration used faulty intelligence to escalate in Vietnam, and the quagmire cost 60,000 Americans their lives. Initial data points are often the worst excuses to go to war, not the best.

In short, we should worry about July Crises and Gulf of Tonkins, not fret about Munich moments.

Focusing on Ebola in America may actually cause more deaths, because it focuses attention where it actually shouldn’t be (America) rather than where it should (West Africa). Radiolab recently updated one of my favorite episodes of the show, “Patient Zero”, with an update on Ebola. (If you don’t listen to Radiolab, you should.) This line stuck out to me [emphasis mine]:

“I think the most important thing we should be doing is not letting the public health vs. civil liberties issues in the US distract us from West Africa. As the case count gets higher, it has more chances to mutate and therefore, more opportunities to adapt. So we need to end this outbreak in west Africa before this virus learns too much about us.” David Quammen (Min. 52:45)

Ebola could become more dangerous if it, ironically, becomes less dangerous. If the disease mutates in a way that allows more victims to live and live longer, it could become a pandemic by not burning out too quickly. To mutate in this way--the worst case scenario--the virus needs to infect many, many hosts. This outbreak, which has been brewing since December of last year, could have been stopped early on. Since it hasn’t, Ebola has had more opportunities to become more dangerous.

But the news media is focused on Ebola in America rather than helping people in Africa, where the real threat of a pandemic looms. (Though again, I’m not afraid.)

Lesson #4: We shouldn’t use the military.

Of course, when the U.S. finally did decided to respond to West Africa, who did we send? The military! With tents! While we appreciate a U.S. response to the Ebola epidemic, it boggles our minds that the U.S. never has a non-military option. USAID couldn’t have supported this mission? Or someone else in the State Department? And of course, the Pentagon put the price tag at a starting point of $750 million dollars.

America consistently believes that the military can solve all the world’s problems, so we fund the Pentagon to the near exclusion of any other department. This means, in times of crisis, we only have the military. This is probably the wrong response to many problems and it is exacerbated by the worst problem...

Lesson #5: We really, really, really need to start investing in countries in the long term.

What do we mean? Many politicians--let’s be honest, Republicans--are really concerned about Ebola. Despite the warnings of professional medical workers, they wanted to shut down travel from Africa and institute incredibly draconian measures to stop the spread of Ebola to the U.S.

You know what would have been more effective? Spending money (like that $750 million from above) a decade ago (when the economy was strong) to help countries face Ebola now. We should have spent money on foreign aid to develop the medical infrastructure in these countries so they’d have been equipped to handle this outbreak.

You know who hates foreign aid? Oh right, the same people who are afraid of Ebola.

We fight terrorism the same way. We wait until a crisis bubbles up--like ISIS, Boko Haram or Syria--then we lose our minds. Instead of helping these nations build their economies that repel terrorist groups naturally, we wait until a crisis happens, and then overreact.

Many readers and Twitter followers have asked us, “When are you writing about American Sniper?”

Looking at our work on Lone Survivor, it makes sense. Chris Kyle was as conservative--if not more so--than Marcus Lutrell and filled his book with conservative and anti-ROE ideology. American Sniper, both the book and the movie, are huge hits. And, as multiple media outlets have noticed, Chris Kyle had a tendency to make things up, including shooting looters after Hurricane Katrina, killing two men at a gas station, and punching Jesse Ventura in the face. (This last one cost his family’s estate after he lost a defamation court case.)

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, we didn’t have time to debunk the facts behind the book. We did, though, have barely enough time last week to write up a piece for Slate, titled, “The Surprising History of American Sniper’s “Wolves, Sheep, and Sheepdogs” Speech”. It also allowed us to finally debunk the sheep, sheepdogs and wolves analogy that we’ve hated for years. (This satisfied another request from our readers, who requested that we debunk this pop philosophy.) Since the American Sniper film uses this analogy, it allowed us to discuss both topics in place.

So, head over to Slate and check it out. Expect more on sheep, sheepdogs and wolves in the next few weeks.

I know what you’re thinking. “Ebola is a disease; how can it be violent?” Fair point. It’s tough to assign agency to a disease. But the Ebola “crisis” in America (and those quotation marks are firmly planted around “crisis”) shows how poorly America--if not the whole world--handles crises.

Unfortunately, America’s focus on Ebola mirrors our focus on terrorism in all the wrong ways. But if America can learn the lessons for either terrorism or Ebola, we have a chance to fundamentally improve our foreign policy.

Lesson #1: Misusing Statistics

This exchange from the cold open on Saturday Night Live a few months ago, mocking the new “Ebola czar”, illustrates how people don’t understand statistics:

Ebola Czar: If anything, we should be more afraid of the flu. It kills way many more people every year.

Reporter: But .01% of people with the flu die from it. And with Ebola it’s 50%.

Ebola Czar: We could all go throwing statistics around.

Reporter: Such as?

Challenge accepted, fake reporter from a sketch comedy show who, strangely enough, actually described how most Americans feel about Ebola.

How many people will die from the flu? “...according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average annual death toll from influenza between 1976 and 2007 was more than twenty-three thousand,” as James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker. So...we’ll need approximately 46,000 more people to contract Ebola to make it deadlier than the flu.

Unlike Ebola, the average person can actually do something about the flu: get a flu shot. The more people that get the flu shot, the better America’s overall herd immunity against the disease. (The CDC no longer recommends just the sick and elderly get the flu shot; everyone should.) Which means if we all work together, as a country, we can save ten of thousands lives. (In fairness, early reports indicate this year’s flu vaccine may not be a good match for this year’s flu, but the CDC still recommends getting a flu shot.)

Will we? No, because people don’t understand statistics. Even our comedy shows, instead of parodying America's misguided fear of Ebola, are actually making us more afraid.

Lesson #2: We overhype the threat.

Ebola, it turns out, doesn’t pose much of a threat to cause a global pandemic. It “burns too hot”, meaning the disease replicates faster than the host can communicate it. In other words, it kills its victims too quickly. (It poses especially little danger to Western nations, since we don’t clean our own dead like they do in West Africa.)

And Ebola is unlikely to go airborne, as David Quammen told RadioLab, “To get to that point, would require a number of mutations that are infinitesimally unlikely...it would be like mutations that would allow a giraffe to fly.” (Min 52:00)

Last week, I asked, “Did we consider the opportunity costs of the first Iraq War?” The answer was, “No.”

But I limited myself to only considering the opportunity costs of spending our “war capital”, the vague combination of American morale/enthusiasm for war. When we go to war we also spend real financial capital. War costs money. And that money has opportunity costs of its own.

How did it get so high? Well, every aircraft carrier costs millions to operate in a war posture. Every deployed soldier costs tens of thousands of dollars. Every contractor costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every cruise missile costs tens of thousands of dollars. Every plane in the sky requires extra maintenance. This totals out to nearly $300,000 for every hour were at war with ISIS.

And America might spend billions more to defeat ISIS. As I referenced last week, fiscally conservative Republicans suddenly become drunken soldiers at the strip club when it comes to fighting wars. So we need to have a conversation about opportunity costs. Here are my biggest candidates for how America could have spent a billion dollars instead of fighting ISIS.

Finally, a caveat: I only wanted to think about foreign policy spending, because frankly, we’d be here all day if we wrote about ways military spending could be converted into domestic spending. (Vaccinations, infrastructure, and so on.)

Paying Down the Debt

Somehow, when it comes to federal spending, wars and military spending don’t seem to count. Famously, the first war in Iraq was the first time America went to war and lowered taxes instead of raising them. As Eric C wrote in his comment on last Monday’s post, in 2008, whenever Republicans accused Democrats of raising the debt with proposed stimulus programs, all he could think about was constantly increasing defense spending, intelligence spending increases after 9/11, and the ginormous cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without a dime raised in taxes to cover these costs.

An opportunity cost of the first Iraq war, in monetary terms, was not saving money for stimulus in case the economy crashed. Which happened five years after the first war started.

How much have the post 9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries cost so far? At least $1.5 trillion, according to James Fallows. According to Linda J. Bilmes, the price tag could reach up to $4 to 6 trillion, factoring in associated military costs and veteran's benefits.

But we shouldn’t live in the past. Let’s look to the future. And the very simple calculation every politician should make is whether it is more important for America to pay down its debt (now and in the future) or to fight another war in the Middle East. Maybe the current billion dollar price tag won’t break the bank, but it would help.

Leading the World in the Sustainable Development Goals

Later this year, the U.N. will replace the Millenium Development Goals--that were moderately successful--with the Sustainable Development Goals. The U.S. could really cement its leadership of the world by vowing to spend 1.0% of its GDP on foreign aid and development. (The current global target is 0.7% of GDP.) The U.S. currently spends 0.19% of its GDP on foreign aid. (Despite the perception that the US spends 25 to 30% of the federal budget on foreign aid, it spends about 2%.) We could even do it with business friendly tactics like direct aid, small business loans, and venture capital support. But the U.S. would rather spend a billion dollars on war funding than getting people out of poverty.

Or Leading the World on Climate Change

If you’ve been reading/following any of the Economist’s year ahead coverage, you know that later this year the world’s leaders are meeting in Paris for a summit on climate change. While the U.S. and China have taken a step on the path to confronting climate change by agreeing to terms, the U.S. could do even more by helping developing countries confront climate change. Financially, developing countries face a tougher burden developing green energy; strategically, this is the best way to stop carbon pollution.

Again, this would require hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, and it would require the Senate to ratify a treaty (more on that next week), but it is a real option. And it is possibly much more dangerous than ISIS.

Fighting Ebola

Finally, let’s close with a way we could have really helped people last year. What if I told you that Ebola could have been stopped before it became an epidemic. You would probably say, “Well, yeah, I read about that in the The New York Times, how poor communication led to an epidemic.”

And you’d be right.

Frankly, America has some of the best health care professionals in the world. If we had an extra billion dollars to spend on helping people abroad, I wish we’d spent much more, much sooner in Africa. Perhaps we could have tracked the spread of the disease more effectively, preventing the tragic lack of communication that led to the deaths of tens of thousands. We would have actually saved lives, built up good will, and come across as a nation interested in helping people.

(Today's guest post is by Carrie Morgan. If you would like to guest write for us, please check out our guest post guidelines.

Quick note: The views of guest writers are not necessarily the view of Michael C. or Eric C. For our take, please check out the comments below.)

A lot has been written about the “civil-military divide” over the last few years. And while there have been a few prominent civilian voices on this subject (e.g. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran, whose book For Love of Country highlights the stories and sacrifices of post-9/11 veterans, and James Fallow, whose article “The Tragedy of the American Military” appears in this month’s issue of The Atlantic), most discussions of the “civ/mil” divide have been dominated by military voices. This makes sense, since the people experiencing the civ/mil divide most viscerally are typically the folks on the “mil” side of that divide. The majority of civilians aren’t even aware that the divide exists.

Of course, that isn’t to say that civilians don’t suffer from the existence of the divide, because we do. Millions of Americans have served in the military, and when their service is done, they leave the military and find a place among the rest of us. Knowing them--our neighbors and coworkers--and understanding their experiences in service to our country helps us understand our world and our place in it. The skills and insights our “citizen soldiers” bring to the civilian world enrich our democracy. When veterans and military folk are disconnected from the civilian community around them, we all lose.

Still, most discussions of the civ/mil divide remain dominated by military voices, and this one-sidedness is a symptom of the very problem these discussions aim to resolve.

Because they themselves have not served, the civilian community is largely ignorant of the challenges faced by military families and the difficulties service members face when transitioning to a life “off-post.” This gap in understanding is exacerbated by the perception by many in the military community that civilians don’t understand their needs or experiences and never, ever will.

I understand where this frustration comes from. However, this “if you haven’t served, then” attitude is completely unhelpful in narrowing the civ/mil divide. In fact, it only makes that chasm wider, deeper, and more difficult to bridge.

At its heart, the civ/mil divide is about understanding and communication—or more accurately, a lack of it. Many civilians don’t know much about the military experience, and many military folk feel that civilians don’t understand them. The only way to cure this lack of understanding and foster empathy among the civilian community is to enable civilians to access military experiences, and the only mechanism for this to occur (short of drafting all 250 million non-veteran American adults into the military) is communication.

We can narrow the civil/military divide. It’s important for veterans, for those currently serving in uniform, and ultimately for our society and democracy as a whole. It won’t be easy, and it will take effort on both the “civ” and “mil” sides of the divide.

Communication is the key.

Will civilians listen? Some won’t, sure, but a lot of them will. While very few of us have donned a uniform, many of us know someone who has. Most of us are not veterans, but we have friends or family who are. Those links, those connections, form a basis for understanding—but only if both sides of the civ/mil divide are willing to communicate.

Veterans and military folks, I’m talking to you.

Don’t shut civilians out. Tell us what you think. Share your experiences and your viewpoints--please--but dialogue is a two-way street. We have to listen to one another. If a civilian friend, neighbor or coworker opines on a subject of national security, don’t dismiss that opinion out of hand simply because the speaker hasn’t served. If you disagree, fine--but instead of simply saying, “You’ve never served, so you don’t know what you’re talking about,” politely explain why. Open exchange will foster the empathy that will heal the chasms between us. That’s the only way this will work. If we can’t keep the channels of communication open, then the civ/mil divide will remain.

And that hurts us all, both “civ” and “mil” alike.

Carrie Morgan has written a novel, The Road Back From Broken, about the struggle of a military family affected by post-traumatic stress and war trauma. She lives in Orlando, Florida with her husband, a U.S. Army infantry veteran, and is working on a second novel. You can follow her on Twitter here and at her blog, "Wages of War."

At the end of 2012, Michael C was interviewed by Robert Tollast--who frequently writes on Iraq for the Small Wars Journal--for a piece in The National Interest, "Maliki’s Private Army". In hindsight, it’s kind of eerily predictive of Maliki’s future actions.

Whatever it is about the Middle East, it causes staunch, free-market-loving Republicans to forget their economics. Mention Obamacare, government regulation, the minimum wage or any other social issue, and free-market, libertarian-esque Republicans will extol the virtues of economics. Yet as soon as they begin talking about Iraq or Syria, these lessons disappear. Specifically, these Republicans (and all policy makers in Washington, really) refuse to acknowledge the costs associated with foreign policy.

As we reflect on the reemergence of a civil war in Iraq, it seems appropriate to see how well the U.S.--led by the Bush administration--acknowledged the opportunity costs of the first war in Iraq.

Let’s spell this out with a hypothetical example. You own a pizza shop. (In business school, I swear all the business examples involve restaurants, even though most MBAs work in consultancies or investment banks. Curious.) You have ten stores, each doing incredible business. I mean, you’re slinging pizzas to every wahoo on the block. Obviously, you want to expand. You have about a million in cash, and it costs about a million dollars to open a new restaurant. You have narrowed down your options to three different cities.

So what do you do?

If you are in charge of American foreign policy, you open up a restaurant in every single city and go into massive debt.

But wait, that doesn’t make any sense! You don’t have the cash or resources to do that. You would likely fail at every new city--because you can’t devote the time, energy, manpower and resources to each one--and could cost yourself your entire franchise. (This isn’t purely hypothetical. Many restaurants have over-expanded to ill outcome.)

This is what happened in Iraq in 2003. Despite fighting an ongoing war in Afghanistan and a new “war on terror” (which sucked up huge amounts of capital to build a massive new intelligence and domestic security apparatus) President Bush, Vice President Cheney and all their diplomatic, military and intelligence advisers told America that we had the resources (in business terms, capital) to invade another country.

Except we (America) didn’t.

The business metaphor also shows the incredibly poor return on investment of invading Iraq. As Dexter Filkins recently covered, we basically deposed a Sunni despot for a Shia despot, while radicalizing a population of Sunni Muslims. (Though, Dexter Filkins illustrated in this podcast a fantastic ability to cling to “sunk costs”.) In terms of “what did we get for what we spent”, we blew it.

The biggest opportunity cost is spending what you could call “war capital”, the support needed to wage wars. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spent most of America’s “war capital”, and spent it poorly. It also meant we ignored the war in Afghanistan for far too long, wasting support for that fight. So when it comes to other possible American wars like...

Enforcing President Obama’s redline in Syria? Can’t, because Iraq made Americans afraid of messy civil wars.

Intervening in Ukraine? Can’t because Americans don’t want another war (and Russia has nuclear weapons).

Do something more in Libya, Egypt, Yemen or wherever else Charles Krauthammer or Bill Kristol wants? Can’t because Iraq, Iraq, Iraq and Iraq.

Most Americans, who live outside the confines of Washington D.C., understand that we don’t have the military capital to start another war in those places because we spent that capital (poorly) on Iraq. Nevertheless, despite widespread opposition, America started bombing Iraq anew and even put boots on the ground. Are there opportunity costs to that? You betcha, and we’ll discuss that on Thursday.

When ISIS started taking territory in Iraq, America--with an assist from the media--became afraid of two things. The first was that ISIS would start launching Al Qaeda style attacks against the US, which Michael C debunked yesterday. The second was that…

ISIS IS ABOUT TO TAKE BAGHDAD!!!!!!!!!

Unfortunately, ISIS has been about to take Baghdad for over half a year now...

To be fair, ISIS “threatened” Baghdad mainly in June and October. But this collection is only a partial list. I only started collecting headlines like this after ISIS threatened Baghdad the second time, and I thought, “They haven’t taken Baghdad yet? They’ve been threatening them since June.” More important than that question is this one:

Can ISIS even take Baghdad?

Now, I’m no military expert--that’s Michael C’s area of expertise--but from my layman’s point of view, one thought stands out: Baghdad is majority Shia. True, finding accurate numbers on the actual demographic breakdown is not easy. But according to Newsweek and Joel Wing’s excellent Musings on Iraq--which cites the CIA fact book--Baghdad is 70 to 80% Shia. Secondly, the Shia majority has some very powerful militias ready at their disposal, as America learned the hard way.

“If all the actions of the Islamic State, or IS, to date weren’t sufficiently reprehensible, this act and the potential for other similar acts will snap American attention with laser-like focus onto the real danger IS poses to the existence of Iraq, the order of the region and to the homelands of Europe and America.”

To make sure his readers understand the severity, he continues, “Make no mistake, the abomination of IS is a clear and present danger to the U.S.” Remarkably, General Allen provides almost no evidence to prove this point.

I’m not picking on just General Allen; no one in the Obama administration, including the President himself, or congressmen advocating for war, ever provided evidence that ISIS posed a threat to the US beyond “Trust us.” A perfect example is this USA Today article with the provocative headline, “Islamic State biggest threat since 9/11, sources say”. Again, beyond “sources”, it didn’t have any evidence.

Since I can’t debunk every media article, I want to use General Allen’s op-ed as a case study in how to over-hype the threat of terrorists. So what evidence did Gen. Allen bring to bear? Here’s a list after reading and re-reading his op-ed:

- The Islamic State wants to establish a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

- There are foreign fighters in their ranks.

- They are a well-organized insurgent group.

- They have money and weapons.

- They beheaded one American journalist. (And since more.)

- Al Qaeda used Taliban support in Afghanistan.

- Finally, this vague sentence: “The leadership of the so-called Caliphate has been clear that it will focus on Western and American targets if given the chance...”

So all those factors point to a group that could and is threatening the current state of Iraq. At least they have a significant chance to carve out a chunk of territory for their own. The problem is many of those “facts” don’t lead to ISIS being a threat to America’s homeland, as General Allen claimed.

Take the first and last bullet points; they’re contradictory. If ISIS wants to establish a Caliphate, the worst thing it could do would be to provoke US, UK and European nations into re-invading Iraq. That would set back its plans years, decades or end them all together. (Ask the Taliban how it worked out for them.)

To top it off, this dire and immediate threat to the US finished the year by completely dropping out of the news almost altogether, except for articles about how ISIS ended the year stalled out.

(Oh, and using the evidence that because Al Qaeda was harbored by the Taliban that ISIS will surely harbor international terrorists isn’t evidence.)

Yes, ISIS committed a war crime when it executed a journalist in Iraq. Yes, ISIS is bad for the Middle East and civil wars are bad for the world. However, given that it is against their interests to attack the US, we don’t know how many troops they have in the first place, they don’t have a terrorist arm, it is probably reasonable to conclude they won’t attack the U.S. homeland.

If politicians really want to make the case for action against ISIS, they can, but they shouldn’t hype a terror threat on our homeland.

In one of our first posts, Eric C made a bold prediction. In “The Obama Blame Game Part 2”, he wrote that, “Since 2003 all terrorist roads lead through Iraq.” He predicted that, in the future, terrorists would be inspired by Iraq, trained in warfare in Iraq, and even funded/organized in Iraq. In short, invading Iraq would have more to do with promoting extremism than it did in stopping it.

Like other predictions we have made, Eric went from being wrong to right. Terrorism didn’t “go through Iraq”, as a succession of lone wolf, would-be jihadists--the failed Times Square bombing or the failed underwear bombing or the failed cargo plane attacks--had their origins in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, respectively. The Boston Marathon bombing had its origins with Muslim Chechens.

(Eric C clung to his point that, borne out by each of the above plots, the U.S. invasion of Iraq still inspired many, most or all of the would-be jihadists.)

Then came ISIS. When the Islamic State of Iraq/Syria/Levant beheaded Western journalists, it seemed to finally vindicate Eric C. And when they invaded Iraq, the Washington national security establishment jumped on board with Eric C’s thesis: ISIS (formerly the scary Al Qaeda in Iraq) is the new boogeyman of the moment. These national security types believe that if we don’t get involved in Iraq again, we will be attacked on our own homeland (though many were the same who advocated for invading Iraq the first time).

In just the above four paragraphs, we’ve related Iraq to international terrorism, counter-insurgency, extremism, failed predictions, American politics, the failure of the Army, a “Getting Orwellian” topic, and we’ve only just started scratching the surface. Iraq, one of the reasons Michael C joined ROTC, one of the places he deployed (at the very end), one of the inspirations for this blog, is back in the news because its civil war (unsurprisingly) re-ignited. And that civil war involved the beheading of a US journalist that caused the country to believe ISIS was the most dangerous organization in the world. And that fear, in part, helped swing the balance of power in Washington in an election year.

So we have our “On V Most Thought Provoking Event of 2014”, though not without some controversy, which we debated yesterday.

Of course, the thoughts this war inspired are legion. Expect a good bit of debunking, controversial opinions, and unmentioned ideas.

In short, as a nation, still haven’t learned the lessons of the last decade.

And then we found out--or more accurately, Congress confirmed--that our country tortured detainees during the war on terror, including rectal feeding, the killing of prisoners, the capture and detention of innocent men, and many other war crimes and human rights abuses.

We both consider the torture report an “absolutely devastating catastrophe”. Not in terms of a foreign policy crisis, but a catastrophe of constitutional proportions; a revelation that America had, in response to 9/11, violated its core principles in a way that ranks with the worst sins in American history, like internment, the Sedition Act and Watergate.

For Michael C, the torture report was bad, but not bad enough to displace Iraq as the most thought provoking event of the year. For Eric C, it was all he could think, read or write about for a week. Frankly, we still don’t agree. To quote Intelligence Squared, “Well, that sounds like the makings of a debate, so let’s have it”: what mattered more in 2014: Iraq Redux or the Torture Report?

Eric C’s Argument:

I’ll concede one point early on: I certainly think both events are thought-provoking. (Though on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, I don’t feel as confident as Michael C writing about Iraq as I do writing about torture.) But the torture report matters more than America intervening again in Iraq, because of what it represents symbolically.

With Iraq, America just ended up making the same mistakes, again. With the torture report, at least we’re trying to learn from our mistakes. In short, Iraq represents more of the same; the torture report represents a country trying to move forward. At least there was a debate.

And that, to me, is what truly matters. After 9/11, our country made mistakes, and if we write about the torture report, I feel that On Violence can add to the chorus of people, pundits and writers trying to make our country better; with Iraq, I don’t feel like the lessons will be learned.

Michael C’s Argument:

Each year Eric C and I pick the most “thought-provoking” event of the year--the event that inspires the most unique thoughts or ideas--then we write about that for a week (or two). On that front, Iraq Redux just inspires more unique, On-V-esque ideas than the torture report.

Iraq Redux had poor media coverage (the constant threat of invading Baghdad; over-hyping of the threat of ISIS), fearmongering on terrorism (the beheadings of Western journalists), discussion of counter-insurgency theory (the debate on airstrikes or more troops in Baghdad), the ramifications of international relations theory (including the duty to protect innocents versus realism versus liberalism) to start.

This isn’t to say the release of the Senate’s report on torture isn’t thought-provoking. It pretty soundly took over the media for a cycle. It also unites certain conservatives and liberals. And it shows the uniqueness of democracies: how often in history have rulers of a country willingly admitted they committed war crimes?

But most of our post ideas aren’t unique, but more filled with outrage that it happened in the first place. That isn’t unique or thought provoking per se, just morally outraging.

Eric C’s Conclusion:

I’ve decided to concede this argument, for two reasons. The first is practical, but intellectually not admirable: we’re mostly done with a whole bunch of posts on Iraq and we (the Cummings Bros) have a very busy month ahead of us.

But on a thematic, what-this-blog-is-working-towards level, in discussing torture (the release of the torture report), Iraq (the rise of ISIS and America “needing” to engage Iraq militarily for the fourth time in four decades), and the NSA (the release of Citizen 4 and more revelations of citizen snooping), a new theme emerged:

America has begun pushing back on our collective over-reaction to 9/11.

Altogether, the outlines of a new series and an essay or two emerged, which we plan/hope to finish in the next few months, after we write about Iraq and a bunch of other random topics. A number of themes of the blog--the dehumanization of our enemies, the world is getting safer, an unquestioning faith in the national security establishment--help explain America’s overreaction to 9/11, and we want to explore it.

So enjoy our series on Iraq Redux, which begins tomorrow. But expect much, much more in the year ahead.

On Violence is a blog on counter-insurgency warfare, military and foreign affairs, art, and violence, written by two brothers--one a veteran and the other a pacifist.

The work of On Violence has appeared in The Washington Post, Stars and Stripes, The Small Wars Journal, The New York Times’ "At War" blog, The Los Angeles Times’ Blowback feature, FP.com and Thomas Ricks’ “The Best Defense” blog, Infantry Magazine, and Doonesbury’s “The Sandbox”.